


Only With You

by sherlezza



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, POV Second Person, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pining, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Suicidal Thoughts, again not a lot but it's mentioned, bucky pov, like sort of not a lot just sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 17:56:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1697222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sherlezza/pseuds/sherlezza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’ve been in his bed six days and haven’t left once.</p><p>You’re so scared that if you do you’ll convince yourself you were never really there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only With You

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Warm Enough](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1591121) by [sherlezza](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sherlezza/pseuds/sherlezza). 



_Slam. A bloodied lip, a broken nose._

“You’re!”

_Slam. A bone on the facial plate crumbles. You’re so strong. You’re unstoppable. You will complete your mission._

“My!”

_Slam. Broken jaw. He shouldn’t be able to speak anymore, and that will make things significantly easier._

“Mission!”

_Slam. A soft, gentle voice whispers in your head, tells you that you’ve done well. It’s the voice that you always hear after the cold and the blissful blankness. You look forward to it, now. He should be unconscious, and dead soon._

“Then finish it. Cause’ I’m with you til’…the end of the line…”

_The voice is screaming, he is falling, and you remember falling too once and what did he just say and why do you feel like a different person is shredding through your chest, filling your head with his screams, escaping, and that other person inside you tears his way through your skin and dives into the water after the man from the bridge and won’t stop screaming that he hates you he hates he hates you and he loves him and what have you done what you have done what have you done._

 

\--------

 

You have no money and you’ve been living out of this decrepit and uninhabited apartment for six days without eating. Surprisingly, you’re not hungry yet—you must be used to this, you realize, and you try to feel sorry for yourself but it just makes you feel sick instead.

You sleep, maybe. One hour, twelve hours, you don’t know, the lines between nightmares and reality are too blurry now and you just want to crawl back to cryofreeze and memory wipes like a dog with nowhere else to go crawls back to the owner who kicks them. 

Did you carry him to the shore? You want to believe you did. You have a memory, somewhere, of your cold, horrific hand, that hand you don’t want _please take it off please rip it off please no_ , gripping hard around his neck, pulling him to the bank, looking at the water gurgling from his throat and feeling your own constrict. But you don’t know if that memory is real just like you don’t know if any of them are and wouldn’t it just be easier if you ended it now?

 

\--------

 

There’s a knife in your belt and it’s the sharpest knife you think has probably ever been created in history. The man who lives inside you tears it out and holds it to your neck and you feel your face stretch into an unfamiliar shape, _a smile_. He’s smiling and crying and he presses the blade toward your neck and without thinking you’ve thrown it across the room, where it lodges neatly into the drywall, and he screams and screams and screams, _I hate you I hate you you’re a fucking coward you’re a monster and I’m going to kill you_. He sobs and you feel it spilling from your eyes and choking you and you don’t know who he is but he’s inside you and he’s going to get out soon and if you’re lucky he just might kill you.

 

\--------

 

_Я завершу свою миссию. Ya zavershit svoyu missiyu._  
 _Я завершу свою миссию. Ya zavershit svoyu missiyu._  
 _Я завершу свою миссию. Ya zavershit svoyu missiyu._

He keeps saying that. _You_ keep saying that. The words feel both foreign and sick and familiar all at once and they won’t stop tumbling from your chapped lips like a promise you don’t want to keep.

_I will complete my mission._  
 _I will complete my mission._  
 _I will complete my mission._

 

\--------

 

It is a quiet January night in Brooklyn and your apartment is blissfully, wonderfully cold. You shouldn’t be so happy that it’s below freezing, you should be scared shitless about Steve getting pneumonia again, but lately whenever it’s been this cold at night, Steve has crawled into your arms seeking warmth and you have more than enough to share with him. But right now, it’s quiet, and Steve is about five feet away and it’s about six feet too many, and he hasn’t said a word and maybe he can sleep just fine without you, maybe he doesn’t need you at all—

And then it’s not quiet. God, you didn’t know teeth could chatter that loud. The whole room might as well be vibrating, and there’s no way you’d ever sleep knowing that he’s that cold—he could get sick again, or worse, and you can’t let that happen. That’s what you tell yourself. You’re doing this for him. But maybe, if you can say it right—

“You are shivering hard enough to cause a damn earthquake, Stevie.” You see the words tumble out, clumsy, nervous, followed by a hot puff of air, your shallow breath feeling too big in the apartment that has suddenly become really really small and way too big all at once. You chance a look to your left, see the fucking _tiny_ bundle that you know is Steve, still shaking all over and feel your heart constrict when you look at him in that way that you know it shouldn’t, that you know is sick and bad and all sorts of wrong. 

“Sorry,” comes a weak rasp from five feet to your left, and you can’t stand how his teeth chatter after he says it, his breath coming out and disappearing into the cold January air, and you know that you shouldn’t do what you want to do but you’re going to do it anyway and you’re going to convince yourself it’s for him and not for you the whole time. You exaggerate a sigh, try to inject it with the exasperated concern that you’re supposed to feel, instead of the warmth blossoming in your gut and the giddy anticipation of getting to wrap yourself around him, hold him like you always want to every single damn night. You’d never admit even to yourself that you pray for cold nights, because that would be sickeningly selfish and that’s exactly what you know you are as you take a deep breath, steadying, and then:

“Stevie,” you try to make it sound sleepy and low and warm and inviting, and you also try not to think about what that means as you see him scoot closer and closer until he’s finally, finally curled tight against you, and you wrap your arms around his small frame and feel it shudder under you, one last time, before he sighs and relaxes into you. You’ve never done anything harder than stopping yourself from burying your face in his scrappy blond hair and peppering it with kisses. 

“Warm enough for you yet, punk?” You whisper against the back of his head, trying to sound confident and smug like you would if you weren’t desperately trying not to kiss every inch of bony, exposed collarbone about an inch from your lips. He doesn’t answer and you’re glad, because if he said _yes, I am warm enough, yes, you’re keeping me warm, yes, Bucky, yes_ , you wouldn’t be able to keep that heat in your stomach from pooling somewhere else and then he would know and he would leave you and he is the only thing good thing in the world and he is the only good part of _you_ and you can’t live without him. 

So instead you close your eyes and fake deep breaths so that he will sleep against you and you can commit to memory every soft sigh and shift and movement of his body against yours. And when you think he’s finally asleep, you press yourself tighter around him, listen to the low wheeze of his inhale, until you hear a small whisper escape into the darkness in front of you, and it’s quiet and sad like a secret and it’s gone so fast you’re not sure if you imagined it.

“Only with you.”

 

\--------

 

There’s nothing in this apartment but an empty bookshelf and dust, and most of the dust is probably from you because you haven’t been clean since _they_ cleaned you. You could find somewhere to shower but you can’t because you have memories that make you shudder of sterile metal showers and men in waterproof armored suits pointing guns at you with one hand while they wash and touch you with the other. They didn’t let you wash yourself, and you never would’ve asked, because you didn’t think to—you weren’t a person, but a weapon being polished, and you always left the polishing to them. 

You can’t stay here or you’ll suffocate choking on your own skin, floating through the air and forcing itself into your lungs and reminding you of the destruction at your feet and the blood all over your hands. 

You can’t stay here, and you can’t go there, and.

 

\--------

 

You said you wouldn’t go here but you’re not the same person you where when you promised yourself that and now you’re here and there are familiar, sick words thrumming loud in your broken mind, and they’re so loud and you just want quiet again, you want to be wiped clean again, and—

_Я завершу свою миссию. Ya zavershit svoyu missiyu._  
Я завершу свою миссию. Ya zavershit svoyu missiyu.  
Я завершу свою миссию. Ya zavershit svoyu missiyu. 

It’s all you can do not to scream it as you slip, silent, always so silent, into a warm, well-furnished bedroom, and you are analyzing everything in the room and you’ve already gone over seventeen ways of silently killing him but you can’t bring yourself to even look at him, helpless, sleeping, presenting to you the easiest target you could ever want, except you don’t want it at all. But there’s so much _noise_ in your head, there’s so much and it’s too much and you have to finish it before it finishes you, so you silence the screaming in your head and then you are all around him and your hand, your horrible metal hand you begged them not to put on you _please just kill me instead please_ is crushing his windpipe and his eyes are on you like they aren’t even afraid, they’re full of surprise and then something that looks too much like love as you choke him and choke him and choke him. You’ve tried to shut out all the noise like you know you used to be able to on missions but you can’t shut him out, you’ve never been able to shut him out, even when they wiped you again and again you always came back screaming his name with his face burned into your mind like a brand and you can’t shut him out now when he chokes out your name, you know it’s your name, like it’s his dying wish and he needs you to hear it before he’s gone. And you break, you collapse, and it happens so fast but it feels like a lifetime passes before you finally crumble into his chest with that arm still wrapped around his neck and his own collide into you and hold you tighter than you ever let yourself hold him. He whispers your name into your long, dirty hair over and over like it’s the only word he ever learned and you sob like a child onto him, your tears a sparkling trail like stars around his collarbone, and you don’t know how long it lasts but the next time you find yourself again he’s asleep beneath you, arms still wrapped protectively over your back, and you aren’t really you again and that cold weapon of an arm is still close to his throat so you leave before his blood is on it, too. 

 

\--------

 

It’s been four days since he held you and you don’t know if you’ll make it to five.

 

\--------

 

Each night you hole up in a new strange place, an abandoned building, an old office, a blur of crumbling, lonely rooms. You would stay at a homeless shelter, but you wake up at night screaming, or sobbing, or with violence in your heart, and you don’t want to hurt any more people than you know you already have. 

You feel like you don’t know anything about yourself anymore, who you were before you were a weapon, who you were during and who you are now—they’re all different people and you don’t know any of them. There’s only one thing you know for certain in the world. 

There’s only one thing.

 

\--------

 

You were ten years old when you first knew that you were in love with him. Scrawny, skinny, and scrappy, he was the only thing that ever made you want to be good, the only thing that ever kept you off the bottle like your dad and out of the markets stealing because he could give you one disappointed look and you’d do anything to make it go away. You were the older one and you were meant to act like it, but you were always trying to make _him_ proud of _you_ , and it never mattered that you were older or stronger or anything because he was so much better than you, he was like the sun and you just couldn’t look away. 

But damn did you try.

You tried to look away with booze, you tried to look away with parties, and you really tried to look away with girls. A new one on your arm every week, and in your bed, and you tried so fucking hard not to think about him every time and every time you failed. And quickly, a pattern emerged—a string of blonde, skinny girls danced in and out of your life, the only sort of twisted allocation you would let yourself have, and it made you sick, flirting and charming and fucking them, imagining your best friend in their place, and you knew you were sick and you knew it was wrong and it never stopped you. 

 

\--------

 

You leave half a glass of water on the kitchen table as a warning, and then you take a few deep breaths and walk to his bedroom.

Putting on one of his t-shirts feels too much like an indulgence; you’re suspecting more and more that there was something there, that maybe, once, he loved you too, but you know he can’t now because you’re not the same man you were and you don’t even know if you’re human anymore but if you are you’re not the good kind. You pull his shirt over your head anyway—it’s too big for you, and you don’t understand why Steve’s shirt would be too big for you, and you don’t know if that makes you happy or sad but it definitely makes you something. You rummage for sweatpants too, and although you’re not clean, you’ve at least changed out of the straight-jacket-like black uniform that smells like blood and death and gunpowder and sweat and fear, so much fear. You crawl into his bed, feeling childlike and _definitely_ indulgent, too indulgent now, but you curl up there and it’s so soft you think you might fall right through but for once you feel safe and you fall asleep without intending to. 

Later, you don’t know how much later, you feel a shift on the bed and you’re out of it and halfway across the room, pupils blown wide in fear, before you register a grip, firm but somehow still gentle on your arm. It takes every ounce of strength for you to stop running and turn around, and he’s standing there with pleading eyes and those arms that held you tight and you want to run but you also never want to leave again when he’s looking at you like that, all soft features and love seeping out his every pore, and something inside you stirs when you see him looking at you like that, and he whispers to you. 

“Bucky,” his voice is so gentle, so caring, you think you might snap just hearing his lips holding your name like that, like you know you always wanted him too. “Please, Bucky, it’s me, it’s Steve. It’s me. You know me. You _saved_ me.” There’s a pause, both painfully long and terrifyingly short, and his grip tightens infinitesimally before he speaks again, his soft voice choked with fear and spilling out like an accident. “I love you.”

 _No. No. He couldn’t have said that about you he couldn’t have meant you he doesn’t love you you are not that man he loves you are not a man at all you are a cold hard piece of metal strapped to that man’s corpse and you have to tear yourself away from him before he sees what you’ve become_. You try to rip your hand out of his grasp, but it’s so much harder than it seems and in the end it just slides out slowly, reluctantly, and comes up to clutch at your pounding, confused head. “No. No. No.” You hear yourself whimpering but you’re helpless to stop it as your head opens like a floodgate and everything comes spilling out. “I—I don’t—I’m not him.” And you hear your voice crack and it’s all over, tears are tracking down your face now and they aren’t going to stop so you don’t bother wiping them away, just let them stream from your eyes while your metal hand twists hard in your hair, painful and pulling and sharp. “I’m not him. You don’t love me, I’m not him, I’m not him I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—,” and you’re screaming, he’s screaming from inside you, that man with the burdened heart whose body is stuck to your metal arm, he screams and screams in anguish and it’s so loud and you can hear the arm whirring close to your face, pain on your head growing sharper, maybe it’s trying to end it for you since you’re too much of a coward to do it. But then, he’s there, his arms are tight and warm around you again like you’ve been dreaming about for days and your tears are soaking into linen from his chest where your broken head is now resting. There’s a hot wetness on the top of your head, he’s crying, and he’s clutching you so tight it’s like he thinks you’re falling away from him, and maybe he does, and a soft litany tumbles from his lips into you again and again, “I love you I love you I love you I love you please stay.”

 

\--------

 

You’ve done almost nothing but sleep since you decided to stay and you must have needed it because now that you’re with him, now that you finally feel somewhat safe, you can’t seem to stay conscious, at least not for long. Some things haven’t changed, though, and the nightmares still wake you, and now Steve too, who pulls you flush against him, wraps you in his body and makes it feel like home (it’s always felt like home), changes you out of your sweat-soaked clothing in the middle of the night when you’re still too fucked up to do it yourself. 

Steve, for his part, seems to mumble in his sleep every night whenever he holds you. You can’t quite make out anything, but at least he’s not screaming. 

 

\--------

 

You dream of kissing him one night.

You dream of killing him the next.

You wake up crying both times, and when he tries to comfort you with his touch, you flinch away, too afraid you’ll follow through on either of them.

 

\--------

 

You wake up screaming, someone else dead by your hands, and you know it was more than a dream and you know it was a real memory and Steve reaches for you, alert immediately, hands stroking down your back and soft whispered promises in your ear that it wasn’t you, that it’s not your fault. You don’t know if that’s true, or if you can let yourself believe that, and you sob into him. When you’ve run out of tears, he places a gentle hand under your chin, tips your head up to look at him, and he looks so genuine and loving you can’t help but crack underneath his gaze, and he just coos to you, his voice so tender you can’t stand it. 

“Hey, hey, listen to me, Buck, listen, look here, huh, look at me.” You drag your eyes to his, and he traces the back of a hand down your tear-stained cheek, and the gesture feels so intimate that your breath hitches in your throat. 

“Bucky. You’ve done nothing, _nothing at all_ , to make me love you less.” 

You fall asleep in a tangle of limbs. Steve mumbles whenever he holds you. Three words, repeated again and again in a sleep-heavy murmur. 

“Only with you.”

 

\--------

 

You have a lot of nightmares, but this isn’t one of them. 

No, this is a dream full of soft kisses peppered on naked skin, full of the hot press of bodies moving together, this is a dream full of Steve, and you remember you used to have lots of dreams like this before everything including yourself fell apart. You feel his skin under your fingertips, you snake your arms around him, squeeze tight, huff a hot breath into the crook of his neck. Your mumble something low into his ear, and imagine his hands on you, and yours on him, and you press your hardness into him and stifle a groan at the contact. Your voice is thick with sleep and arousal and you admit it to him while you press into him, “feel so good, Stevie, I always wondered…always wanted…,” and you roll your hips languidly into him, and sigh as you hear him whisper something, three familiar words that mean something _important_ , but sleep is taking you again and you can’t figure out where they’re from, and. 

“Only with you.”

 

\--------

 

You’ve been in his bed six days and haven’t left once.

You’re so scared that if you do you’ll convince yourself you were never really there.

 

\--------

 

It’s 3:14 in the morning on a Saturday and you have been pretending to be sleeping for approximately two hours. Instead, you’ve been at war with yourself, and when you can’t stand it for one more second you press your nose into Steve’s back and whisper his name. He twists immediately, sheets tangling around him as he turns to face you, to comfort you, and he looks into your eyes and you try to gulp down your fear as he whispers back. 

“Yeah, Buck?”

His voice is so soft, and you know that the fear that you’re feeling is leaking into your face now, probably along with a whole lot of humiliation. You feel a flush creep up your neck as he twines his warm flesh-and-blood fingers with your metal ones. You look down at the image they make together, cold shining silver against tan, and almost want to smile, if you weren’t so nervous. You can’t remember everything yet but you can’t wait a second longer to know for sure. His eyes find yours again, concern written all over his face and knit into his brow.

“Bucky, you can tell me, it’s okay.”

It sort of just comes tumbling out.

“Were we…did I…?” You blush instantly, feeling your face heat fast under the sudden blaze in his eyes, and it’s the second hardest thing you’ve ever done not to kiss him then, and there’s a fire lit inside him but it suddenly dims, dims, dims.

“No, Buck.” He says, and you try not to let yourself think that maybe there was disappointment in his tone, and you swallow your pride and heat spreads down your neck with it. You never should’ve said anything. You obviously never did before.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t of…I just thought…,” you stumble over your words and hate the way you feel your throat constrict and your eyes moisten. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—,”  
And he catches your next apology between his lips and crushes it in a sudden, slightly possessive clash of his teeth against yours, and in a second he’s all around you, and you’re whimpering into his throat and pressing your metal hand hard into the small of his back. You can feel fresh, hot tears between your cheeks as they press up against his and you aren’t sure whose they are but they make you feel clean for the first time in _decades_ and you chase that feeling into his arms, between his lips. It’s not really a memory, but it’s something even stronger that pulses into your head and you know that this is all you ever wanted and all you ever needed to remember, and over seventy years of love wrenches a sob from you against his mouth.

“I’ve always wanted you, I’ve always wanted you.” 

You taste salt in your mouth as you crash against him like a tidal wave finally coming to shore. “I don’t remember everything, but I remember wanting you.”

 

\--------

 

You know you’ve had sex before but you’ve never made love to anyone.

You’re flush against his back, the swell of your chest filling in the curve, and kissing a trail along his spine like a constellation, feeling his slow breathing under your fingertips, and the curtain of your hair brushing against his cheek. All the dreams you’ve had about this have never prepared you for the feeling of pressing into him, feeling your fingers twine again as you move together, the breathy little gasps he lets out against your ear when you come back to him again and again and again. You lose track of time, finally feeling whole again as you join with him, rain drumming light against the window, and.

 

\--------

 

“I want to know about you. All the things I don’t remember yet.” 

_Yet_. You like your word choice. You feel his smile in your hair and hope he feels yours against his chest. 

“Okay. Ask me.”

“What’s your favorite color?” _If that asshole says—_

“Red, White, and Blue.” _God damn it he did_. You glare. He relents.

“Okay. Blue. And yours is green.”

“I know that.” You need a less shitty question. “What’s your favorite…shape?”

“The one we make in bed together.”

 

\--------

 

That man inside you who he loves is actually you. You know it when he traces letters over your metal palm and up onto your forearm, you make out an ‘o’, ‘n’, ‘w’, ‘t’, ‘o’, and ‘u’, definitely missing some inbetween, but give up trying to string together what it means and settle for kissing him instead.

No one calls you “puppet” in Russian anymore in your sleep. Instead, he calls you a jerk, and you give up on trying to get back at him and settle for kissing him instead.

He sticks a fridge magnet of the Washington Monument on your arm and falls all over himself laughing. You give up trying to retort that at least you can still get drunk and settle for kissing him instead.

 

\--------

 

You twist around in bed, and see all the things you used to hate yourself for dreaming about. Dust dances in the afternoon sunlight that dapples the sheets and warms your skin. Every time you open your eyes, you see his favorite shape. It’s yours too.

He still mumbles in his sleep whenever he holds you. The only thing you ever want to fall asleep to is his sleep-heavy voice warm against your skin.  
“Only with you.” 

 

\--------

 

Apparently, you mumble in your sleep whenever he holds you. 

“Warm enough for you yet, punk?”

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a companion piece to [this fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1591121) which is my first one, written from Steve's perspective. This one is written from Bucky's. I hope you liked it ♡  
> [And here's the obvious link to my own tumblr](http://barnvs.tumblr.com)


End file.
